lunedì, 10 giugno 2013

What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a “thing”. (Gregory Bateson, 1978, p. 249)

WARNING:As my friend Raffaele said, this is the DTDT territory: “Define the Damn Thing”. Luckily this doesn’t happen very often and I believe I’ll be out of the loop soon. If you’d like to keep on reading, be aware that you do so at your own risk: I am trying to suggest a new definition for Information Architecture but I am not really an expert in this kind of stuff. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to share my ideas for a specific reason. But since I am mean… you will find the reason only at the end of this post.

It all started a few days ago when I heard Tim O’Reilly quote Edwin Shlossberg: “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”. Right there I thought that “writing” could be replaced by “Information Architecture” as, after so many years spent in a media group, this is how I see Information Architecture.

I couldn’t help but think about that line in the following days, when all the pieces came together in my head and I came up with this: Information Architecture is an infrastructure for organized thinking*.

At first I tried to analyze this new definition using my experience as Information Architect in Gruppo Espresso (a major Italian media group). I thought that it was good enough to describe the logic, the criteria and the structures of analogic communications ecosystems. The “meaning” is basically the body of space-time relationships that single elements of information build with one another (as in a newspaper page or in a news broadcast schedule). I also think that this broad approach helps describe the main activity of my work: defining the logic of the archive, the correlation, and the representation of all the elements that make a digital narration. It’s becoming clearer to those working in the “communication” business that the actual value lays in the relationships between various pieces of content rather than in each single piece of information. In fact Jeff Jarvis wrote: “media should be in the relationship business, not just the content business. In other words, media’s value isn’t necessarily intrinsic in content — as in, ‘you should pay for this product because the work to create it has value’ — but can be realized in the relationships that form around content”.

Flipping again through the pages of the book Pervasive Information Architecture by Resmini and Rosati, I realized that they also see Information Architecture as the glue that holds together, in a coherent way, the wealth of information in respect to the people that interact with it in a cross-channel experience. Indeed, Resmini and Rosati see Information Architecture as an enabling factor towards the restoration of the meaning, that is the restoration of the role that each single information element (or sub-cluster) plays in the information ecosystem as a whole.

Then I re-read Morville’s article in the Journal of IAand found some considerations that I thought may be in line with the idea that a “relation”, and the ability to think of it as such, are the cornerstones of a project: “information architects are inveterate systems thinkers. In the Web’s early days, we were the folks who focused less on pages than on the relationships between pages. Today, we continue to design organization, navigation, and search systems as integral parts of the whole. Of course, the context of our practice has shifted. Increasingly, we must design for experiences across channels. Mobile and social are just the beginning. Our future-friendly, cross-channel information architectures need to address the full spectrum of platforms, devices, and media. This has inspired our community to shed the web-centric worldview in favor of a medium-independent perspective. Jorge Arango captures this nicely in Architectures in which he argues that where architects use forms and spaces to design environments for inhabitation, information architects use nodes and links to create environments for understanding”.

Well organized relationships have always been part of structures. They are “objectively” simple (i.e. the bibliography of a book) and “subjectively” complex (i.e. a person’s own memories). However, the digital environment changed all this. As the number of nodes is growing, there is an ever more compelling need for “extrinsic correlations”. Information Architecture helps bind the nodes by creating a structure (a layer) of “objective” relationships. Over time it became more valuable to enable the act of “thinking” a relationship than the act of “implementing” a relationship itself. Ten years ago it was essential to setup categories, labels and criteria to classify information in order to create rigid relationships. Today, IA’s main task is to study ways to manage, filter, sort and enable the relationship-building between metadata.

Hence, a relationship-building approach should be extended:

- (on small scale) to the relationship between the individual elements of the narration and the user who is interacting with them;

- (on a medium scale) to the infrastructure of the relationships of an individual user involved in a multi-channel environment, and;

- (on a large scale) to the infrastructure of the relationships between people: to communicate, organize themselves and share (think about the role of IA in social media)

Let’s go back now to the traditional definitions of Information Architectures:

1- The structural design of shared information environments

2- The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities, and software to support findability and usability

3- An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape

4- The combination of organization, labeling, search and navigation systems within websites and intranets

For me, those definitions were always somewhat unconvincing: the first is missing the “why”; the second offers a partial list and limited goals; the third is out of focus as it describes the IA itself not its objectives; and the fourth combines the problems of the first two definitions.

But the most important question I ask myself is: why would one undertake all the tasks outlined above if it weren’t to setup the grounds to create relationships between information elements and between those elements and people?

I spent quite some time on the word “infrastructure” – I was not sure whether it was the right word. If I used the words “logic” or “system” I would have probably stressed the abstract side of IA. It would be the same if I used the word “platform”, because it stressed the focus on the “artifact” where IA “happens”. I thought that the word “infrastructure” would address both the “immaterial” side of IA (an infrastructure can be a logic, a criteria) and the its “material” side (an intranet).

I found support in a paper by Susan Leight Star (thanks to Carlo Toccaceli Blasi for suggesting it), where she says: “infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them”. She also quotes a brilliant definition by Star and Ruhleder (1996): “infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practices”.

Saying that an infrastructure is so in relation to “organized practices” is like saying that a chef sees the piping system that make tap water available, an “infrastructure” to the act of cooking. This is why in the second part of my definition of IA I felt the need to consider IA as the infrastructure that makes possible the act of thinking information in relation to one another and in respect to the relations they establish with people.

Therefore, it is of paramount importance that we think of “infrastructure” as an enabling factor rather than a “system of concepts worked out in steel” as Robert M. Pirsig would probably say. However, what are the “properties” of an infrastructure? Susan Leight Star suggests some that seem to be written to describe good Information Architecture:

Embeddedness
Infrastructure is sunk into and inside of other structures, social arrangements, and technologies

TransparencyInfrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks.

Reach or scope
This may be either spatial or temporal—infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice.

Learned as part of membershipThe taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is asine qua nonof membership in a community of practice

Links with conventions of practiceInfrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice

Embodiment of standardsModified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion

Built on an installed baseInfrastructure does not grow de novo; it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strengths and limitations from that base

Becomes visible upon breakdownThe normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks

Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globallyBecause infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above.

I believe that defining Information Architecture as an infrastructure for organized thinking helps keep together the many aspects of our community: the one that focuses on the deep systems’ logic, the one that focuses on the logic’s visuals and its (ever more) tangible outputs, the one that focuses on the elicitation strategies to gather the requirement that the infrastructure needs to be able to address in the first place.

I was not sure as to whether to share my thoughts on all this. I’ve decided to go ahead and share them hoping that epistemological analyses should - once again - be inclusive rather than exclusive and that this would help unite our community instead of dividing it. I feel that each of latest definitions proposed seem to be going in the direction of narrowing and specializing the scope of the initial definition of IA, and therefore causing divisions among ourselves.

I hope you will assess the value (if any) of this document as an attempt towards a more inclusive definition of IA, rather than for the very definition proposed.

Mr. Badaloni - this is important and excellent work you’re doing: please do not allow the DTDT-haters to impede your progress here, which is impressive.

I think you’d benefit from considering the most recent works from Jorge Arango, in particular his contention that IA is concerned with, in his words, ” the structural integrity of meaning across contexts.” I’d love to see a mash-up of your definition with his declaration:

IA is an infrastructure for enacting and protecting the integrity of meaning across contexts.